Foam pads have long been used for various types of personal protection equipment in athletics, such as shoulder pads, knee and thigh pads, elbow pads, athletic supporters, and helmets. Foam pads are commonly constructed of large, uniformly thick foam sheets to cover a particular region. Such pads are bulky and limit an athlete's mobility. These pads also do little to disperse the energy absorbed from an impact. While the foam pad absorbed some energy and force, what is not absorbed passes through the foam in the same direction as the direction of impact. Stated differently, when the foam is impacted, unabsorbed force passes straight through the pad to the underlying region.
More recently, it has become popular to score or pellet certain panels of foam padding into small units, such as hexagons or squares, to allow the pad to more easily curve or flex about a rounded surface, and thereby to closely conform to the body. While this in theory may in some cases accommodate an athlete's mobility, it does not address the manner in which the padding absorbs, disperses, or deflects forces, which typically are passed in a substantially straight line vector through the pad to the underlying area intended for protection. In fact, traditional padding, whether segmented or not, relies substantially only on the padding's ability to absorb impact forces, while not much attention has been given to dispersing or deflecting forces.
The traditional design of football shoulder pads evidences a reluctance to rely upon the protective absorbing, being traditionally designed to sit raised above the wearer's shoulders. In such configuration, the shoulder pad is designed to deflect downward to absorb force, while a hard yoke component flexes to absorb additional energy. However, such pads suffer from a higher-than-desired profile and can impair a wearer from being able to comfortably turn his neck or easily raise his arms. While shoulder pads having increased flexibility would be welcomed, reducing the size of a conventional pad may increase the potential force impacting the wearer, while the use of pads that closely conform to the body would compete against the design characteristics of such shoulder pads, which must be raised above the shoulder to provide the amount of protection for which they are engineered, by allowing the flexing yoke to work as designed.
What is needed, then, is a pad better able to absorb, deflect, or disperse impact energy and forces, optimally while allowing for increased wearer flexibility and mobility.